This cringeworthy Microsoft Teams feature could soon be forced upon you
Meeting hosts will soon have the power to activate Together Mode for all
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Microsoftis readying an update forcollaboration platformTeams that will allow admins to change the way meetings are displayed for all attendees.
As explained in anew entryto the company’s product roadmap, meeting hosts will soon be given the option to enable Together Mode for all participants. The update is still under development, but should take effect by the end of May.
Launched in the summer of 2020, Together Mode forMicrosoft Teamsbrings all attendees into a sharedvirtual background, with the goal of “making it feel like you’re sitting in the same soom with everyone else”.
Together Mode in Microsoft Teams
Although the ambition behind Together Mode is a noble one, the execution leaves plenty to be desired. In this writer’s opinion, the virtual background filled with floating heads only serves toemphasizethe fact a meeting is not, in fact, taking place in-person.
While Microsoft’s AI system does a decent enough job of cutting out each person’s home office background, and some people will get on with the feature better than others, there’s an unwelcome strangeness to the final result.
The idea that meeting hosts should be able to dictate that everyone uses the feature is particularly strange. While there’s something to be said for operating on a level playing field, some users are bound to find the feature more helpful (or unhelpful) than others, which makes a blanket policy counterproductive.
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However, not all of Microsoft’s attempts to introduce variety to the way Teams meetings are displayed have been quite so divisive.
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Last year, the company rolled out a series of new presenter modes designed to help Teams users flex theirpresentationstyle to the occasion. Standout Mode, for example, seats the presenter’s video feed in front of the slide deck, while Reporter Mode places content above the shoulder in the style of a news broadcast.
The features were an example of the way in which virtual backgrounds and clever positioning of content can legitimately improve the quality ofvideo meetings, delivering on Microsoft’s stated ambition to “help presenters deliver content more professionally and offer meeting participants dynamic experiences”.
Joel Khalili is the News and Features Editor at TechRadar Pro, covering cybersecurity, data privacy, cloud, AI, blockchain, internet infrastructure, 5G, data storage and computing. He’s responsible for curating our news content, as well as commissioning and producing features on the technologies that are transforming the way the world does business.
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